The Telluride film festival is a rarified festival. It’s a place physically hard to get to. Likewise, the festival organizers pride themselves on presenting movies that require a little extra work on the part of the audience. Not that every movie is tough, but if a festival goer isn’t careful, it’s pretty easy to wind up staring at the ceiling … Read more
Forest animation rendered in realtime with Chaos’ new Lavina technology. The scene has over 300 billion triangles and 80,000 instances running at 24–30 frames per second with no rasterized graphics or reduced level of detail as might be used for game engine rendering. In this case, the render was performed on Nvidia’s Quadro RTX GPUs. Chaos Group showcased its new … Read more
Ai Build is a company that has managed to combine all the hot-button technologies of manufacturing into one product package—the Ai Build Factory as a Service (FaaS). It’s AI+large scale 3D printing+IoT. Unveiled at the Victoria and Albert Museum during Digital Design Weekend 2018, Ai Build’s new package gives manufacturers the ability to license their automated fabrication product for on-prem … Read more
The many ways content is being created is changing and so are the way we see things. This issue of TechWatch, has some stories that are continuing gifts from Siggraph as well as news that has come out ahead of IBC; and all that is in addition to the random stuff we stumble across — but a whole bunch of … Read more
At IBC, digitalization is a done deal and 4K becoming the norm; 8K is coming in with new screens, cameras, transmission systems, CODECS, and lenses all built to satisfy increasing demand. UHD is at home in living rooms around the world and the discussion now is around HDR. All of that adds of the heavy workloads for workstations and servers, … Read more
Siemens has announced the acquisition of Lightwork Design of Sheffield, England. Lightwork began life as an OEM provider of rendering software to many CAD companies including Autodesk, PTC, Siemens, and Dassault at one time or another. The company did not make products that sold directly to customers. Lightwork Design supplied rendering technology to Siemens for over twenty years. The company … Read more
Take a little bit of AI, mix it with 3D technology, add marketing advertising experience and you might come up with something like Ryff, a new company with the ability to seamlessly add products in video content after the content has been published. Ryff is built around its new technology called Placer. Using Placer, content can be placed dynamically, and … Read more
Maxon introduced Cinema 4D release 20 at Siggraph this year and rolled out the new software weeks later. They’ve got that stable cadence down, as befits a German company, though the company has a strong North American presence as well since the US is Cinema 4D’s largest user base. Maxon is a 3D modeling and animation tool with a strong … Read more
Maxon’s parent company Nemetschek has always been an interesting company, more a group of independent companies with a layer of infrastructure on top to provide some management and bookkeeping. The structure has served the company well since its founding in 1986. The individual companies were motivated to excel on their own. But, in some instances, it seemed the company wasn’t … Read more
Allegorithmic has been throwing itself parties all around the world to show off its capabilities, to teach users new tricks, and to preview upcoming software. Allegorithmic, with the help of industry partners, is defining new territory for content creation. Fun with procedural textures: all of these images are made of textures on simple shapes by people with too much time … Read more
In 2018, the HP Sprout all-in-one creative content workstation got a significant upgrade as HP took in all the response it received to the original product and made significant changes to relaunch the next version, the Sprout Pro G2. Like the original Sprout, the Pro G2 includes a 3D camera to enable an integrated scanning workflow and adds a 20-point … Read more
This collection of stories doesn’t come close to saying all we have to say about Siggraph, not by a long shot. But honestly, we had to put something on the cover, and a picture of the Vancouver convention center is as good as anything. VR, AR, MR etc. continue to pull too much attention away from some of the real … Read more
